The IIT-Madras has recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Purdue University of the US to enable a joint venture for supervision of doctoral candidates between the two institutions. The representatives of both the institutions are hoping that the partnership will lead to a joint Ph.D programme in the future.

This agreement allows IIT-M faculty to co-advise doctoral students at Purdue University and vice versa. This will help the students of both the universities to be encouraged towards the international experience as the students would be visiting the other university. A co-adviser from the native country would accompany the students while they are visiting the other university. Purdue University is said to be the third most prominent STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) university in the US and has been ranked highly among the universities from around the world in The Times Higher Education World University Rankings and the US News and World Report Rankings of Undergraduate programmes.

A team of more than a dozen faculty members from the seven departments of IIT-Madras is involved in this collaborative research with their counterparts at Purdue University, which also includes a number of 1,500 students from India. The heads of the two institutions spoke about reforms brought in to keep pace with the way students learn and the requirements of the job market. Both the universities were looking to transform at least one of the university's colleges to a project-based mode to allow students to move through the course according to their potential. The students would be rewarded with competency-based degrees based on demonstrated mastery of concepts and skills rather than just on the basis of the performance measured only at fixed calendar intervals of classroom time.

The institutions have also been engaging in hybrid modes of teaching which includes experiments like flip classrooms and embedded learning that do not just focus on how much time a student spends in the class or taking notes, but it focuses more on project-based learning and interactive exchanges of ideas and knowledge between students and the faculty. This also helps the faculty to find out which student is struggling with which concept.

IIT-M institute provides the students the much needed flexibility to learn on their own and go to faculty on a needs only basis. It is an establishing club that is challenge-based, like groups on water, education, transportation, healthcare, etc because disruptive solutions are multi-disciplinary. The IIT Madras officials have made the realisation that the business as usual is going to leave them out of business.